One of the fastest growing areas of technology at the time of filing the present application is the area of message communication. In the information world, rapid access to information and rapid response to messages is often critical to maintain a competitive edge or to be able to take advantage of rapidly changing opportunities. Many message services have been developed and are made available in various ways by service providers, and new such services include are regularly under development. Such services e-mail, facsimile, voice or pager, and combinations of these and other modes.
Among the many message services provided, some are essentially one-way in nature. That is, a service can notify you of an event or a trend, but you may not be able to make an immediate response, and any response may require access to a different apparatus than that upon which or by which the message was delivered.
Paging services have historically fit into the above-described category of no-response systems. Pagers have recently been developed, however, that allow limited response. These pager devices have buttons, usually two to four, that provided for an incremental signal return. Such pagers also typically have a memory system allowing a limited number if pager messages to be stored and recalled, from as few as perhaps ten in some less-expensive pagers, to as many as a hundred or more in more expensive models. The activation of the different buttons and combinations of buttons may be recognized at the sender's facility. Pre-programmed code associated with the button signals may be executed, initiated by the receipt of the button signals. It is with these sorts of pager systems that the present invention is concerned.
With available responsive pager systems typically a single response is solicited and acted upon. What is needed is an interactive system making use of two-way pager abilities wherein ongoing rounds of interactive selections may be made allowing a user to make specific selections out of a variety of options and/or to initiate execution of specific actions based on certain types of information received, independent of whether or not the action is directly related to the received information.